How the Click camera app brings Content Credentials to phones

Garrett Kinsman grew up surrounded by high-speed optics setups, with a scanning electron microscope in his living room. His father produced scientific stock photos with highly specialized and sophisticated analog photography equipment. Then came the advent of digital and smartphone photography. Kinsman saw the value of single images begin to plummet, but also the subsequent rise—and power—of democratized access to image-making. 

“We saw this during the Arab Spring in the 2010s, where digital photos shot on a cell phone caused uproars around the world,” he said. “Now that we’re in the age of AI, fake images are circulating like wildfire, and the world needs a way to verify reality.”

Today, Kinsman heads up partnerships and business development at Nodle, a “digital trust network for social good”, that he co-founded with Micha Benoliel in 2017. Nodle uses smartphones as nodes to create a decentralized physical infrastructure network, or DePIN, built on the Ethereum blockchain. In December, Nodle launched Click, a camera app that allows users to create photographs and videos that have C2PA Content Credentials attached. The data is also added to a blockchain. While the C2PA specification allows for the use of a distributed ledger to store data, it is not a requirement. For implementers who want true decentralized storage of data, blockchain might be desirable, but it’s not for those who want the ability to redact sensitive information.

Although the ability to establish provenance and authenticate images in-camera is becoming available with hardware from Leica, and implementations by Nikon, Sony, and Canon are coming soon, Click is notable for being among the first to bring the option to attach Content Credentials at image capture to anyone with a mobile app. The promise: not only can anyone have a visual voice, but that voice can be verified and trusted. 

We recently spoke with Kinsman and Jeff Roberto, Nodle’s Chief Marketing Officer, about how Click implemented Content Credentials and the importance of making content authentication accessible to the broader public. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

How would you describe Click?

Nodle’s Click camera app, available on iOS or Android, empowers creators and consumers everywhere to easily create authentic media content. Click is on a mission to combat misinformation and bring truthful photos and videos to everyone via an immutable digital proof of authenticity. This makes it easy to confirm something is real, and that it happened at a specific location, time, and using a specific mobile device and camera. This is all made possible by ContentSign, Click’s proprietary technology, which proves the integrity of data following its moment of capture on-chain.

We believe smartphones are the most powerful cameras built today. If you compare the latest iPhone to a modern cinema camera, not only does the iPhone have comparable RAW cinema capabilities, it has far more image processing power and social sharing features. Click seeks to truly unlock the power of a modern smartphone, and provide a place for creators and journalists to authenticate and protect their work. 

Who are you looking to reach?

Click is for everyone! It’s especially useful for photographers, citizen journalists, reporters, government workers, sports fans, celebrities, educators, instructors and content creators. ​

How do Content Credentials work in Click?

Content Credentials are at the heart of Click, securing each image and video at capture. Click additionally uploads the Content Credentials to a blockchain, storing the file on a decentralized file system (IPFS). This allows anyone to view the credentials record to authenticate the image, and check the blockchain reference for proof of time and location. 

This allows us to decentralize trust and leverage the secure system built into your smartphone. Now, instead of having to go buy a self-signed certificate, which costs tens or hundreds of dollars per certificate, we can just issue a blockchain reference, which is very, very cheap for the user.

How did you use the CAI’s open-source tools?

We use the C2PA Rust library and created mobile bindings to run on iOS and Android natively.  We invested significant time and resources to develop a mobile-friendly PKI system to manage signing certificates. Traditional PKI schemes and business models for certificates do not apply well to the mobile scale required for C2PA. Nodle is investigating alternatives to develop a decentralized certificate management system for C2PA. 

What challenges did you encounter while implementing Content Credentials?

Content Credentials today are built on a web2.0 architecture, which is highly reliant on certificates. Deploying certificates at scale to millions of smartphone users can be extremely expensive. Blockchain helps solve this problem, and we joined the C2PA working group to better integrate blockchain with the C2PA and attach identity. 

Where do you see Click in the context of today’s political climate in the United States, and citizen-driven movements here and around the world?

This is a big focus for us and it’s going to be a big consumer case, not only this year, but in the years ahead. An app like Click will be a tool to combat misinformation and disinformation, and authenticated content will be how people navigate these challenges in the future. 

There’s a lot of education that needs to happen, of course, but this will become the norm. People will be asking, “Is this image authentic? Where’s the certificate? Where’s the metadata? Is there additional proof?” 

Click has now partnered with Campaign Verify, a non-partisan, nonprofit service for U.S. political campaigns, parties, and PACs to verify their identity. In this partnership, Click is the trusted camera and content utility by which political figures will prove authenticity of their Click photos and videos.

How does Click protect the privacy of citizen journalists or other users who may become targets of authorities or bad actors, since the information stored on blockchain is immutable?

We don’t collect any data about who the user is—it’s a randomly generated public key. For location, that’s the biggest risk today. We’re going to enable a feature soon that obfuscates location, showing less precision.

Have you thought about implementing verified identity in Click?

We know that the Creator Assertions Working Group is working on a standard for that. We will probably implement something on-chain soon using an Ethereum address and then using Twitter/X. That’s something that we definitely want to do, but it’s about how to do it in the best way.

How has Click been leveraged for breaking news events?

We had one user who photographed a car on fire on a bridge, and then a local news outlet reposted it. Recently, a photo of flooding in the Phillippines was reshared by a news outlet there. Little things like that are starting to happen. 

What's next?

We want as many people as possible downloading the Click app. So far, we’ve attracted over 25,000 users, and are ramping up our marketing efforts in a big way ahead of the U.S. elections. We believe the fastest path to consumer adoption, now that we’ve launched foundational features like our new content channels, is to grow organic distribution.

We have validated that there is enterprise demand. We just announced a partnership with Lens Protocol, where all content captured with Click will be easily shareable to the Lens web3 social platform, similar to what we’ve already built for web2 social platforms like Twitter/X, Instagram, Whatsapp, and LinkedIn. We announced a partnership with Vivendi, Europe’s largest media company, to use Click Certify to publish press releases. We think that enterprise is a big area for growth. 

Download the Click app on iOS or Android.